Off with his head

OK, we expect reactionaries like Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly to call for the firing squad for the WikiLeaks source. And ditto whoever writes Sarah Palin’s Facebook stuff (hunt down Julian Assange, the director of Wikileaks “with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders”, describing Assange as “an anti-American operative with blood on his hands.”)

No surprises there.

But who is THIS GUY and what is he on?:

image: Huffington Post front page

Hey Mike Huckabee, aren’t you hoping to run for President again? You think this will help your chances? Maybe. (But you can’t out-crazy Sarah Palin.)

I heard a former British ambassador saying there’s an old word for what WikiLeaks is doing — TREACHERY.

That’s one way of looking at things I guess. But there are others who ask: What’s really being protected? The assignment to US diplomats to gather passwords and DNA samples and personal credit card information from people in their host country? Hello?

Gee, is there any possibility that this, or the reported pressure on the Australian government to charge Julian Assange with something — anything!! — could be a little bit of abuse of power? Just a thought. (image guardian.co.uk - click)

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Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst who in 1971 released the Pentagon Papers which detailed government lies and cover-ups in the Vietnam War, is sceptical of whether the government really believes that lives are at stake.

He told the BBC’s World Today programme that US officials made that same argument every time there was a potentially embarrassing leak.

“The best justification they can find for secrecy is that lives are at stake. Actually, lives are at stake as a result of the silences and lies which a lot of these leaks reveal,” he said.

“The same charges were made against the Pentagon Papers and turned out to be quite invalid.”

It is the historian’s dream. It is the diplomat’s nightmare. Here, for all to see, are the confidences of friends, allies and rivals, garnished with American diplomats’ frank, sometimes excoriating assessments of them ….

There is a genuine public interest in knowing these things.

The Guardian, like the New York Times and other responsible news media, has tried to ensure that nothing we publish puts anyone at risk. We should all demand of WikiLeaks that it does the same.

Yet one question remains. How can diplomacy be conducted under these conditions? A state department spokesman is surely right to say that the revelations are “going to create tension in relationships between our diplomats and our friends around the world”. The conduct of government is already hampered by fear of leaks. An academic friend of mine who worked in the state department under Condoleezza Rice told me that he had once suggested writing a memo posing fundamental questions about US policy in Iraq. “Don’t even think of it,” he was warned – because it would be sure to appear in the next day’s New York Times.

There is a public interest in understanding how the world works and what is done in our name. There is a public interest in the confidential conduct of foreign policy. The two public interests conflict.

One thing I’d bet on, though: the US government must surely be ruing, and urgently reviewing, its weird decision to place a whole library of recent diplomatic correspondence on to a computer system so brilliantly secure that a 22-year-old could download it on to a Lady Gaga CD. Gaga, or what?

Palin has taken to Twitter to vent her frustrations with Obama’s handling of the latest WikiLeaks document drop, but Stewart believes her outrage is primarily unfounded. To prove it, Stewart dissected one of her recent tweets that called for a stop to WikiLeaks’ “treasonous act”:

“There is the fact that WikiLeaks is in Sweden, and its founder Julian Assange is Australian, so really you can’t charge them with treason against America… Because they’re not American,” Stewart said, adding that she might have been able to clarify if she hadn’t used 18 characters to spell out the entire name of her new book, “America By Heart.”